[2][3] Its design emphasizes crispness and elegance, with ball terminals, minimalist brackets, prominent slab serifs, and high contrast between thick and thin strokes.

According to Charles Shaw, "The rugged simplicity of the Century family of types has made it an enduring favorite of American typographers for almost one hundred years.

He commissioned his friend Linn Boyd Benton from the newly formed American Type Founders to devise such a face.

Over the course of the nineteenth century, largely because of the influence of Bodoni, common printing fonts had become thin, making a weak impression on the page.

De Vinne and fellow printer William Morris decried this "growing effeminacy" and called for a reversion to sturdier faces.

:[9] Century proved to be hugely popular and was either licensed or copied by all the makers of mechanical composition machines, including Linotype, Intertype, and Monotype.

A digital version named Benton Modern Text was first prepared by Font Bureau for the Boston Globe and the Detroit Free Press.

[12] Font Bureau had already digitised as a separate project Century Bold Condensed on its own, intending it particularly for newspaper headlines.

Raph Levien has produced a "nearly complete" (but largely unworked on for the past decade) digitization of Century Catalogue under the terms of the Open Font License.

Morris Fuller Benton utilized research done by Clark University that showed young readers more quickly identified letterforms with contrasting weight, but with the lighter strokes maintaining presence.

Tests also showed the importance of maintaining counter-form (the white space around the black letterform) in recognizing the face at smaller sizes.

This never achieved the popularity of its sister faces, was never adapted for machine composition (much less cold type or digital) and was eventually withdrawn.

and Benton, Century Schoolbook was either licensed or copied by all the makers of mechanical composition machines, including Linotype, Intertype, Monotype, and Ludlow.

[9] Linotype also commissioned Rudolph Ruzicka to design Primer, which was intended to compete directly with Century Schoolbook for the text-book market.

[17] A very limited set of styles digitised by URW++ has been released as open-source software as part of the Ghostscript project in type 1 format.

[19][weasel words] Confusingly, the Monotype version offered with Microsoft products is also called just 'Century', perhaps for backwards compatibility reasons from the period when file names had to be short.

[20] Grad is a variant by Phil Martin (digitized by Mark Simonson) based on the original ATF Century Schoolbook.

[23] The thin lines are substantial and the lower-case letters have a larger x-height, and (perhaps ironically) it returns to the condensed nature of the original Century Roman.

The Old Standard web font by Alexey Kryukov is loosely based on the similar styles of type that were used in Europe during the early 20th century.

It is an extremely large family often used by newspapers, with five optical sizes and many professional features such as small caps and alternate figure designs.

[30] Chronicle Text and Display by Hoefler & Frere-Jones are another large Scotch Roman-inspired family with optical sizes intended for newspaper and professional use.